Dr. Larson is assistant professor of
English and director of composition at Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. This article appeared in the Christian Century May 5, 1982, p. 534.
Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by permission. Current
articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for
Religion Online by Ted & Winnie Brock.

Every
poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social
utility. . . . to be something of a pop entertainer [T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and
Drama,” 1951].

From
his Harvard undergraduate days until shortly before his death in 1965, T. S.
Eliot exchanged spooling rhymes, bawdy limericks, and “Bolo poems” with
Conrad Aiken. The high priest of modern poetry loved vaudeville, the patter
of the old music-hall comedians, pop-music clichés, and jingly rhymes of all
sorts. During the ‘30s as “Old Possum” -- an avuncular apologist for cats --
he composed and illustrated sly little lyrics about his favorite pets in
private letters to his godchildren.

Collected in 1939 as Old Possum’s Book
of Practical Cats, these children’s poems for adults introduce a dozen or
more cat personalities who secretly run well-regulated households -- or make a
shambles of them, perform vanishing acts and high-wire entrechats, erupt into
epiphanic transformations, reminisce about their several former lives, and
meditate on their own ineffable names. In a whimsical reading for Decca
records, Eliot himself once exploited the theatrical potential of these poems;
but they so obviously call for more ambitious musical performance -- given
their inventive meters, choric refrains, and many ballad styles -- that it is
surprising no one has done it before.

With Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, the
London dance-musical based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, Eliot
has re-emerged as a popular entertainer commanding huge general audiences of
children and adults. Since this immensely successful show opened on Drury Lane
last spring, it has become the most highly acclaimed English musical since Jesus
Christ Superstar and Evita, Lloyd Webber’s earlier collaborations
with Tim Rice. Cats’ nostalgic score draws upon the collective memory of
the audience through an impressive range of musical allusions -- to the jazz of
the ‘30s, ‘40s and ‘50s as well as to folk, rock, Latin, western, big band,
blues and cafe society tunes -- all mounted in a work that sounds like the
1980s. Superbly directed by Trevor Nunn and choreographed by Gillian Lynne, the
show has also been praised for the witty and charming performances of Wayne
Sleep, Brian Blessed, Paul Nicholas, Elaine Paige and two dozen more in the
lively company.

Cats is incessantly
dancy and lavish in psychedelic spectacle. Yet almost miraculously, Eliot’s
poetic lines (nearly all the lyrics and dialogue) are scarcely ever lost on the
big revolving stage at the New London Theatre. This feat has much to do with
the company’s remarkably disciplined voice work, but first of all it is a
triumph of conception: Cats is not a parasitical version of a minor
literary classic, theatricalized to cash in on the latest crazes for cats and
for dancin’, but an affectionate and faithful interpretation of Eliot’s work:
not only of Practical Cats, but also of unpublished material that his
widow, Valerie Fletcher Eliot, generously contributed to this production; and
more broadly, of the poet’s religious vision. The mysteries of community and
identity; the incursions of the strange into the everyday; rebirth, memory and
desire; the luminous potential of lost moments and the ironic awareness that
they are over: these familiar themes from the Eliot canon bring some depth to
this supremely playful evening in the theater.

Like the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
recent adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby, Cats envelops its audience in a
mythic world. Designer John Napier’s set establishes a mythic space that looks
like everything the cat dragged in, poetically magnified. The partially gutted
and reconstructed interior of this modern theater has become a gigantic cats’
playground where ordinary objects look strange on the round stage and against
the walls curving around behind the audience. Outsize car tires, trash cans, an
electric radio, discarded toothpaste tubes and other barely recognizable refuse
from the urban wasteland evoke a setting Eliot knew from his own aloof, catlike
wanderings through the red-light districts of Boston, Paris and London. At the
same time the nightclub ambience of this blackened theater in the round is just
right for the slinky characters and occasional jazz numbers. Animal and human,
ragged and sophisticated at once, the set is flavored with a peculiarly
Eliotesque irony.

During the overture, the stage takes a turn in one direction, the
backdrops in another, and the ceiling strung with lights becomes a cityscape, a
starry night sky coming alive as cats’ eyes watching us from their secret
places. David Hersey’s lighting begins the metamorphosis of worlds in a musical
that draws repeatedly upon archetypes and transformation. On this night of
nights, an annual ritual for a “Jellicle” breed of cats (sound affinity with
Eliot), we are promised the revelation of their secret lives -- and more, we
may glimpse that other world only creatures who “see in the dark” can see:

We are quiet
enough in the morning hours
We are quiet enough in the afternoon
Reserving our terpsichorean powers
To dance to the light of the Jellicle moon.*

Dancing their eccentric stories, the cats
disclose foibles and vices we recognize as our own, while some characters also
mock the human world we only imagine we control. Choreographer Gillian Lynne
has created a very flexible dance style that conveys these double messages and
adapts extraordinarily well to the spectrum of musical modes. Avoiding a Walt
Disney cuteness, these cats are realistically feline: they arch their backs,
parody prancing, dart out their limbs to scarify or trifle with each other,
stretch in lazy curves, nose ‘round curiously, stare autistically at the
audience. Even so, the animal movements are projected through dancers’ bodies
as expressions of human emotions.

John Napier’s allusive costuming,
cleverly blending the catlike and the human, also avoids a cartoon-cat look:
fluffed-up hair suggests ears; tails are ropy, braided or rolled-up cloth tied
round dancers’ waists; shuffled-down leg warmers hint at furry catlegs; and
strips of bright cloth, beads, feathers and fur sewn on painted bodystockings
make multipatterned coats. We also see a range of human types: the weirdly
attired punk youth who parade down King’s Road in Chelsea, springy carnival
acrobats, slinky street-walkers, clowns, pirates, music-hall entertainers, a
nanny and a portentously furry patriarchal cat, Old Deuteronomy, who lumbers
about like a kindly Grandpa Moses.

Cats celebrates the
mythical and the ironic from the start with its “Prologue: Jellicle Songs for
Jellicle Cats.” Written by Trevor Nunn and Richard Stilgoe, inspired by an
unpublished Eliot draft, this opening number flaunts Jellicle feats in an
anything-is-possible world:

Can you ride on
a broomstick to places far distant
Familiar with candle, with book, and with bell?
Were you Whittington’s friend? the Pied Piper’s assistant?
Have you been an alumnus of Heaven and Hell?

Members of the company trade such
questions across the stage, then gather their forces for the syncopated chorus
that breaks with the verses’ regular prosody, and works into Latin rhythms
backed by a big band sound. This increasingly strenuous opening number climaxes
in a long rhyming catalogue of attributes:

A child’s game of improbably pairing
sound-alike words, this is also a distinctively British sort of performance for
adults, recalling the verbal acrobatics in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas.
From the start the company makes us pay attention to the language of Cats: they
have us on the edge of our seats listening for the double entendre, the witty
word choice, even as we are caught up in the sheer physical joy of the dancing
and in the music s suspenseful expansions as it ascends the scale. From its
powerful opening, Cats rewards concentration by celebrating with equal
intensity the word and the body of the world.

Eliot’s
poems challenged Andrew Lloyd Webber to find a musical style for each
distinctive character. Eliot’s virtuosity as a musician of words also sets
interesting problems for the composer: for example, Eliot’s singsong meters
are often broken or opened up by surprises of syncopation, which fit the
cats’ leaps and quick-changes of identity but also demand certain musical
modes and not others; in addition, he sets his jingles ajar by slant-rhyming
-- an effect which requires enough time and breath for the singer to
enunciate with perfect clarity. Lloyd Webber’s formal achievement has been to
make songs that do not waste these poetic effects in a muddle of verbiage or
notes, or undermine them with inappropriate melodies.

For “Macavity the Mystery Cat,” he has
built an original score on a basic Henry Mancini style (that of Peter Gunn and
The Pink Panther) which is just the right witty mode for this cat’s
“deceitfulness and suavity”:

Macavity’s a
Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw --
For he’s the master criminal who can defy the Law.
He’s the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the
Flying Squad’s despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime-- Macavity’s not there!

Among others with stories of perfect crimes are the
incredibly agile cat-burglar pair, Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer (John Thornton
and Bonnie Langford), who have “really a little more reputation than a couple
of cats can very well bear.” The music indulges their incurable “gift of the
gab” with a more flexible Mancini line that slides out saxophone notes for
their knowing asides, stretches out or bounces up in jazzy grace notes to match
their antics on stage.

Lloyd Webber and director Trevor Nunn
have given Eliot’s Rum Turn Tugger, a contrary cat who is “always on the wrong
side of every door,” a post -- Elvis Presley/Mick Jagger style that wins the
squeals of his feline fans. “The Tugger” (Paul Nicholas) bursts out on stage,
microphone in hand, wagging his thick curly mane and strutting in his tight
black leather outfit (trimmed in leopard fur) to punched-out rhythms:

. . . If you
offer me pheasant I’d rather have grouse,
If you put me in a house I would: prefer a flat,
If you put me in a flat I’d rather have a house. . . .

Remarkably, Eliot’s mechanical meter, with its
one-syllable words, anticipates the Presley style so copied in the late ‘60s,
and it is perfect for the bump-and-grind Nicholas works into his performance.

Eliot’s mock epic ballad in an older
style, “Growl-tiger’s Last Stand,” is a big production number made bigger with
a barroom ballad interlude, and all of it is framed by another story. Old
Asparagus the Theatre Cat (Stephen Tate), a down-and-out Cockney actor,
reminisces about his old roles to a tenderly sympathetic piano and oboe --
especially the time when he “once played Growl-tiger, could do it again. . . .“
In a flash he sheds his tatterdemalion coat to reveal a fearsome wharfside
pirate, with a smart bandanna and a rakish patch over “one forbidding eye”:

Growl-tiger was
a bravo cat, who travelled on a barge;
In fact he was the roughest cat that ever roamed at large.
From Gravesend up to Oxford he pursued his evil aims,
Rejoicing in his title of ‘The Terror of the Thames.’

Growl-tiger will soon face his Waterloo
at the hands of the enemy Siamese cats, but first he and his winsome dance-hall
lover, Lady Griddlebone, must sing “their last duet, in danger of their lives.”
Here space is made for Eliot’s unpublished “The Ballad of Billy McCaw,” a song
in the genre of the working-class sing-along and the sort of thing Eliot had
praised in the ‘20s. The wonderful quasi-operatic manner in which Tate renders
this song suggests the precariously collected dignity of the performing drunk.

Oh, how well I
remember the old Bull and Bush,
Where we used to go down of a Sattaday night--
. . . A very nice house, from basement to garret
A very nice house, ah, but it was the parrot--
The parrot, the parrot named Billy M’caw,
That brought all those folk to the bar.
Ah! he was the life of the bar.
Of a Sattaday night, we was all feeling bright,
And Lily La Rose -- the barmaid that was--
She’d say: ‘Billy! Billy M’Caw!
Came give us come give us a dance on the bar!’
And Billy would dance on the bar
And Billy would dance on the bar...

Eliot was a wonderful imitator of voices
and popular forms; his barroom song has all the assumed intimacy with subject
and audience, and the irrational episodic connections that such songs naturally
develop through their affectionately muddled associations. And while our
balladeer gets deeper into his muddle, the neglected Lady Griddlebone (Susan
Jane Tanner) goes all fluttery in her ostrich feathers and twitchy in the face,
to launch the best comic acting of the show. All this is rudely halted by the
full-scale attack of the enemy Siamese -- a band of martial-arts cats swirling
immense rice-paper fans and colorful scarves to the marching music of piccolos.

If this number presents the most
inventive comic acting in Cats, the most dazzling dancing is Wayne Sleep’s
minting tricks and fancy body work as Mr. Mistoffelees, the “Original Conjuring
Cat.” Near the end of Act II, the audience is well-primed to join in on the
choruses, led by The Tugger:

And we all say:
Oh!
Well I never
Was there ever
A cat so clever
As magical Mr. Mistoffelees!

The magic of collaboration has recreated
in the London audience a sense of the community that Eliot sought to evoke in
the performance of his verse dramas. The joyous abandon of participation
prepares us for the show’s climax -- a scene not in Practical Cats (which
has no overall plot) but built out of hints from some previously unused Eliot
material about dogs and cats in a hot-air balloon soaring “up up up past the
Russell Hotel” to a magical country just beyond the landmarks of the known
world. Without using balloons, Cats’ climax fulfills the promise of the
Jellicle Ball: the communal acceptance of one elect cat and her ascension to a
fantastical feline heaven.

The candidate for this transformation is
Eliot’s Grizabella the Glamour Cat (Elaine Paige), who had not appeared in the
book (“too sad for children.” explains Mrs. Eliot in the program notes). Nunn
has this shady-lady character, who has strong associations with Eliot’s early Prufrock
period (1917). limp pathetically through the show in the pitying smoky
lamplight that always encircles her, as old neighborhood acquaintances contrast
her past and present selves. Since she is the outcast cat with the heaviest
“memory,” her highly orchestrated chanteuse number by that title (written by
Trevor Nunn) naturally becomes the theme song of the show. The singing style of
Elaine Page (who was also the original stage Evita) blends Petula Clark with
Barbara Cook: the well-trained but unadorned female voice singing her heart
Out. The Grizabella songs, lacking the others’ wit or irony, stand out from the
rest, but they are brought in with long musical transitions and provide the
pathetic interlude we can expect sooner or later in most musicals.

As a
playwright Eliot wrestled with the problem of how to dramatize transcendence
on the gravity-bound stage. Lloyd Webber and Nunn meet the challenge of a
transcendent Jellicle rebirth with sheer technological bravura. Given the
show’s mythic premise, it is finally not too incredible to see Grizabella
disappear into a rainbowy empyrean at dizzying heights above the stage, while
below a gazing Jellicle choir belts out an “angelicle” crescendo of ascending
scales: “Up up up past the Russell Hotel . .” Whatever theological sense or
nonsense this revision of the nine lives legend might make, there is a lesson
here which recalls Eliot’s vision in The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
of “a society in which the natural end of man -- virtue and well-being in
community -- is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end -- beatitude
-- for those who have the eyes to see it.” If only one Jellicle is elected to
paradise, all of us are granted a beatific vision of the event.

In a rare American review of this
musical, Mel Gussow has scored its “bare minimum of social content” (New
York Times, July 26, 1981). The British in wartime 1939 took Practical
Cats to heart, just as Eliot repeated the lyrics under his breath whenever
he was ill or sleepless. Is Cats then just escapist entertainment,
without the “direct social utility” Eliot wanted in the popular arts?

With many ‘20s writers the younger Eliot
shared the avant-garde passion for such popular entertainments as vaudeville
and juggling acts; but his interest lasted long because it was rooted in his
theology of community and in his perception that rhythm -- “the beating of the
drum,” he called it-- is the primitive
source of the arts, as of the religious sense. In his poetic dramas, he wanted
to restore a rhythmic structure that might awaken people’s craving for ritual
and appeal to what he called the “residual” spirituality of his jaded West End
audiences. Cats appeals to those latent religious impulses through dance
and dramatic ritual, interwoven patterns of words and music, archetypal motifs
and other intimations of a deeper order at the heart of things.

Whatever questions might be raised about
Eliot’s political and social allegiances, he understood that “social content”
can lie more fundamentally in form and style than in topical issues; and,
observing that the working man created his own community at the music hall,
Eliot argued more generally that social utility might be gained through
collaborative art. London audiences these days -- caught in the grip of
Britain’s economic troubles, fearful of American militarism in Europe and
disturbed by new waves of IRA bombings -- need the energizing imagination of a
more benevolent social world. Practical Cats gathers a wacky community
of eccentric, even anarchic creatures who know what it means to be vilified,
preyed upon and patronized, but whose differences and pains are included in a
finally generous vision. In Cats outlaws and outcasts are not just
amusing but are caught up in this fundamentally comic rhythm of life.

Of
course, other kinds of theater too are needed to help us see clearly what our
communities are and what they could be in a better world. During the time I
was in London, the Royal Shakespeare Company was staging Alexander
Solzhenitsyn’s The Love-Girl and the innocent, a powerful play about
the Russian camps with the rhythm of a steamroller. At Wyndham’s Theatre the
Marxist Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist, a revolutionary commedia
dell’arte farce, punctured Italy’s pretense of social justice and called
for an abrupt, violent end to all such shabby business. At the Mermaid
Theatre, Mark Medoff’s Children of a Lesser God dramatized the awesome
silences between the deaf and hearing worlds even when they do try to
communicate; at the Piccadilly, Willy Russell’s Educating Rita played
out the ironies of a relationship between a hairdresser student and a
professor/failed poet in his cups, whose job it is to acculturate her. At the
National, Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo (in its way also a
musical) presented the hero’s critical conflict between telling the
unsettling truth about the universe and living in community in history. And
in Hyde Park, where a quarter-million people turned out in late October for
the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally, guerrilla theater groups
entertained the peacemakers with a dozen versions of the end of the world.

Seeing this spectrum of theatrical
performances within a short period put Cats into perspective. Even so,
this dance-musical makes an indispensable contribution to our imagination and.
communal life. Its theater, after all, is not a brightly lit ballroom on 42nd
Street, but a dark space, where cats’ eyes still gleam at us from another
world, and where we are invited to witness, on a specially luminous moonlit
night, the complete crazy consort dancing together.